AIRS, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder onboard NASA's Aqua Satellite, is helping produce a clearer picture of how Earth's weather and climate has evolved over time. Information about our atmosphere collected by AIRS, and by other satellite systems, has been used to build a new, high-quality climate data record that has just been released by the National Centers for Environmental Protection (NCEP) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The data span from 1979 to the present and are of higher precision.

Duane Waliser, Chief Scientist of the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory commented on the news: "It is a credit to the AIRS mission to create products that contribute to weather forecast quality and to resources heavily used for climate analysis and climate model validation."